I’m not an actor. The closest I came to acting was as a high school senior, when I agreed to be in a play that never came about. For whatever reason, not enough guys were available to perform, and I reluctantly agreed after quite a bit of cajoling. I can’t remember why we never did that play (I consider it an act of God’s kindness), but that’s the closest I came to being a thespian.
I’m not much of a drama buff either. I’ve read plays. I’ve been to plays. I even took a theater course in college. But I’m far from being an enthusiast, let alone an expert. I might be one of the least likely people to make a case that we should read the Bible as a drama. But if we do this, it might just revolutionize our family discipleship.
Transform Family Discipleship by Acting Out Scripture
Big claim, right? I need to back it up. What difference could reading the Bible as a drama rather than as a story make? The key is that stories are meant to be read and enjoyed; dramas are meant to be read and performed. What we do after reading the Bible makes all the difference. As we saw in the last chapter, God intends for us to act out our faith. And as famed acting instructor Viola Spolin says, “Acting is doing.” Teaching the Bible as drama positions our discipleship toward doing and builds that work on the foundation of Scripture.
We can certainly find a lot of things to do when we read the Bible as information, history, or story. The Old Testament alone has 613 commandments, 365 of which are prohibitions (think “thou shalt not”) and 248 of which are requirements (think “thou shalt”). That’s a lot of space to be doers, and we haven’t even gotten to the rules in the New Testament, which number over 1,000. But even over 1,600 commands don’t cover all of daily life. Think of the decisions you and your kids make each day—from little ones to big ones. You probably can’t identify a clear command (“thou shalt”) or prohibition (“thou shalt not”) to guide each. We can’t find verses in Scripture saying, “Thou shalt take a summer job, and this is the one thou shalt take,” or, “Thou shalt not cheer for football, but rather for basketball thou shalt cheer,” or, “Thou shalt not buy a gaming system, but rather thou shalt buy your father better birthday gifts.” Many of our everyday decisions fall between what the Bible clearly tells us to do and what it clearly tells us not to do.
The challenge we have as parents discipling our kids is that it often seems we can read and teach the Bible to our kids without having a way to connect it to where they are and how they should live in this gap. We know the Bible was given to guide how we live in every aspect of our lives. We know God cares about all the details of our lives. But how do we connect those dots? Our kids can know the facts of Rahab protecting the spies in Joshua 2, for example. They can know it’s history, and they can even recognize how it connects to the metanarrative of Scripture and ultimately to Jesus.
But what difference does it make to them? There aren’t any commands or prohibitions in that account. How do we apply it then? This, I think, has been the Achilles heel of family discipleship.
Reading the Bible as a drama to perform provides a solution. It turns the space between the “thou shalts” and “the thou shalt nots” from being a nebulous gap of uncertainty and confusion into an amazing opportunity to perform as Christ in new, yet faithful, ways. As we read the Bible, we discover the plot undergirding the drama, the characters performing in the drama, and the action advancing the drama. We also look to these prior acts of the drama in Scripture—such as Rahab protecting the spies—to learn how we can rightly perform our role in our act.
Why Reading the Bible as Drama Inspires Active Faith
When we do this—when we begin with the goal of changed living in mind—we minimize the disconnect we often experience between what we read and what we do. We don’t close the Bible and wonder what to do next; we close the Bible ready to perform the role we’ve been given. And that performance makes all the difference for us and the world around us.
Adapted from Family Discipleship That Works by Brian Dembowczyk. ©2024 by Brian Dembowczyk. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
